where the current of prayer cedes to the tide of talk.The ground here will never be the same,no time will smooth this crease. I wipe my handsand wish I could do likewise with my mind.The hearse’s vapour blasts a startled bird.

Later, I take the blackest coin I findand hurl it into emptiness. It lands,the waters close, and then the purest nothing,as if it never were. Too late a nothing.I bend to wash my hand of filth and metal.

Something crackles underfoot.Incurious though, I remember:the smell of mould in spring,the unimagined dangerof a pitch night on waking,the ache of dizzied years.Nothing remembered answersto any word or questionbut to its rememberedself. There is no origin,only the pain of consequence,words flying like hailinto the dry eye,the cataclysmic, hiddendrop into truth.

A bell across meadowstoo vast to be real:I drove that road one May.It was, I see now, a reprieve.Today there is none. Shadows –Church, market, institution,a distant burial –illuminate the day.This is what we have;all else has fallento a toxic dustsilent underfoot.Still I hope to dream,just once, of a floorbare under treeswhere no light falls,nor rain, beyonda stirring of bluebells.

NEARLY

Too soon to wake, too late to welcome sleep,I fight what's become a nightly war with stillness,a waning moon's imprint on threadbare drapesweak as a fading memory of wholeness;I picture you today, all skin and bone,your dinner of Red Bull and Mayfair Blue,your shoulders tautened by a whirring brainthat spins a shadow of the girl I knew:and all that pain no makeover can dull,that word you still can't bring yourself to sayexcept as xxx or lol.Strange how the simplest things are bought so dearly.I think of you asleep, your dream of clay,and all that beauty not quite lost, but nearly.

A WET EVENING IN MAY

What, in twenty years or less, will it matterto your children, for instance, with children of their own,that one bleak May you shivered and turned your backon love - that word you dare not utter,the bushes dripping in a public park,the sun suddenly licking along the roofs;or that a stranger balanced on your daughter's bikebefore kicking it away. The years will pass as if,as well may be, we're just a fine dust gently blownand landed briefly in a colliding pattern.Wish this house in someone else's hands,this house that will never be whole nor home;leave it open to misfortune and the northern wind,you elsewhere and happy in what you have become.

EGGS

In a momentary light where every wallis white, and day waits to sink,this time in empty silence,

a drunk weaving home, his t-shirtblue as a boy’s, carries in his heada clutch of speckled eggs

lifted from a hedge on a morningthat never was, clotheslines riotously bright,aerials gleaming like rocket-silver.

The stave’s authority is passing; over the hillphrases from each section of the bandare being dismantled. Crowds on the streetthread through each other like shaky lines of ink.The path I walked home years ago looks overbitten banks, runoffs and drainage sumps,wildflowers whose names I never kneware gone beyond the prospect of recollectionand vivid colours are all manmade. This house,this yard. New and wholly its own story,its tar gleaming, chimneys unstained by smokelike Elizabethan ornaments. Its wallsblank and eager as a future. And I recallthose who have gone into the newness of death,into that house, that dip beyond the road,the silence of a final note; their nameslike a wildflower in a concrete fault.

THE RAILING

I look out at an old crow on a wire.He shifts and shits, then settles – just like that.I watch with envy his unthinking balance,the jade and sunset amber of his eyea bead containing everything that’s needful.He shakes his crop a little: then he’s gone,the line not even stirred. I turn and moveback inside, to contemplate a worldof traffic meaningless as Roman legions,

a world whole once, before you moved acrossmy line of vision. Now, like Baudelaire,I rail against the sweetness of sick loveas if it made a difference. Evening thickenslike dying light in rubies, day and nightin perfect balance elsewhere, while within,an empty screen, a dolphin paperweight,embers in a dead house by the sea;the comfort of a repetitious danger.

Beyond the roof, dead roads, unwanted spaces,a mighty falling off from childish dreams,an ancient bakery floor, its Moorish tilesopen like Jesus to the elements;the only hint of red, the sense of eveningbleeding from the canning factory floor.Vows, perfumes, kisses. Shut each lingering blind,one window left alone, a half-meant prayer.Stretch before an unlit, waiting fire,

lost in the waking dream of other cities,rising heat on pavements after rain,old men content, their tales of war now vagueas a far chime over traffic; gilded domes,shields and copper coats of arms on shopfronts,that medieval faith articulatedlulling to belief in one whole day,a glimpse, a fleeting visit, distant hopein nothing but its saving power, its grace

when all else crumbles and no holding outcan dam or stem the pain. Rough beaks will tear,machines will shatter pavements. Yet reposeexists: in inner-city graveyards, in the breathof an old page being turned: vows, kisses, callof birds at dawn, to build, to kill, to cure;in the unknowable, that moment lost,that unseen dust that wraps the sun in amber,beyond our reach, beyond the reach of love.

SPLINTER

Lit out of shot, the gable glows.A neighbour walks to evening Mass,devout sceptic, crowned with sense.A wire whistles as it didthat worst March in memorybefore the miracle of swallows:

I’d longed for them those slush-filled days,their breasts like flags on milk-white books,I’d sheltered in precocious words,the warmth of others’ easy grace.You carried lightly promisescast on you by longer shadows,

A corner of an urban fieldpreserved thus far from builders’ rubble.I watch my steps among the nettles,shocked by an ancient cowdung smell;lean, as you asked, against the lintel,re-read your bolt of lightning letter

astonished at how much you knew,the others who had kept you briefed,the years you spent aloof, awareof every atom of our lives,like most of Europe’s greatest mindsyour insight stuttering on grief.

Impossible to picture yousitting by some cobbled squaretired and wishing to be home,tired, and needing to be homeless.Is it fear or love of distancepinions you to reading-rooms

where everything is second-hand,the world a manageable volume,the weary safety of the page,crises faced at a remove;flowers on your mother’s graveplaced there by strangers, pristine, cardless.

No word, I see, of health or painnor conscience – always messy stuff,even as kids, when it was plainas hell, or singing like a stick.You danced away from sting or slap.I wonder has it tripped you up:

it must have. Maybe you out-thought it,binned it, with despair and love.And if so, what remains? These lines,such knowledge as the years have yieldedand your request. No explanation:maybe in the end, each action

is no more than itself. I prisea rotting splinter from the jambfinger-length, one end a thornand seal it in the envelope.Soon there will be no more must.The forwarding address is dust.

EARLY HAY

Green strips between blades of stubblerun along a field of early hay,curve hillwise, mark tractor contoursor mirror a weather chart, vaguemeeting of pressures.Long, thin mist rises to a drizzlesoon burnt away.

Midday. Full for the moment, rooksglide in an even line over the trees.Featureless small birds mob a young hawkwhich, forced down, struggles against spearsof cut grass, flaps and flops, balancesand screeches like a demented corncrake.Seen off, the sky empties to a sudden silence.

Waiting. Evening rolls across, its heatdies slowly in the marginwhere owltime, crowtime meet.The hillside fades to a dappled crescent,trees are a mushroomed darknessin whose shelter night and day compete.Blackbird, bat, chase the same pallid meat.

WIND

I trace the stretched Z of a mountain road,a swollen glen the storm has lately whipped;now here, where rain has died on stone and statue,I lick my lip. A salt trace in the windand suddenly I see my mother’s lipflecked with the gold of fresh, untipped tobacco:we walk into an Enniskillen cinema,I step beyond the safety of her handtoward the rainbow of projected drama,the story etched on glass, pinpoint, reversed.And it fades out, as every daydream mustexcept that now I’m dreaming in a dreamand in this space where nothing is the samebut for the empty hour, I wait for hopeor the consolation of a Western wind.

DALKEY IN NOVEMBER

You venture out,taking the motorway downonto that great ribbon of promisethat still comforts with its silent distant bustlealthough we’re so far gone we turnthe early news off, passten vans at most:

who can tellwhere or why they headpast filling stations bereft of breakfast rolls.Ahead, the first exit to hint at sea,two roundabouts, right turn, Killiney,a climb, a faux castlegate, then Dalkey.

Unseasonal always,it has a light, a stillnessthat seems to rebuke the turning world.Small houses that look nowhere seem gladof a wall between windowsand cars that turnfor the coast road.

A place for a curewhen no sickness is knownbut the mind is poised for flight, awareof some imprecise contagion in the air:wholesome here, the breezeplays along the mazeof lung and brain.

Like porcelainthat sea, your first glimpsewhen you wandered here, lost in the densewinding of blood along unfurled capillariesshot with adrenaline. Muchhas changed.​Night beckons now,

Dalkey in Novemberpulls dark like a blanketand a house on the hill is the prowof a ship aground, the crew asleep, thinkingof July on the Mediterraneanas they slowly sinkgently, further

into a nightunlike any other.You can turn away from the lights; they shinelike luminous coral or the huge humped spineof a mythic creature remindingof depth, storyand your own struggle,

all that futilebringing to birth of whatyou thought you were. That tight little knotof light beyond Bray – where is it? No map tells –is at the edge, contentto be so: and soyou. Time you went.

SKYLIGHT

The fields belted with frost,candles in fishermen’s cottages,shiplights like notes in the bay.Darkness is a blanket pulled for comfort now:balancing those increments of morning -a slight stiffening of the muscles,an extra pinch of cold.

Two thousand years of words,their weight light in the attic;mermaid and cockle shells,dust on the shelves, stars over the skylight.This is a time for looking back or dreamingand I’m a hundred miles inland,thinking of the books I’ve never read,

children’s books especially,that shock of wonder missed.Fear of the lone child, that universal heart,held me to a solitudewithin the solitary hour: it holdsme still if I don’t step more fully in,deeper into the core of the paradox

where there is no light, nor company,nothing: and then a sudden burstof joy, a flaring like middayon a headland, dizzying, glimpsedin that instant where the dream is felt,charged with its having lived before,rich with the knowledge of imminent waking.

KILCLOON(for Alan and Elizabeth Monahan)

I drain another coffee cupand look out at the sleet that whipsacross the lake, now fierce, now spent.A kid blows on his hands and shuntshis snake of trolleys between cars,a down and out returns the staresof giggling schoolgirls on the mitch.The country tries to start from scratchbut can’t resist the urge to splash:a final binge before the crash,

we keep an old familiar promiseto spend before it’s taken from us,.the nation going down the pan,greedy, venal, also-ran,our leaders confident, of course,with not a whisper of remorse.I think back to that trip we took,the midlands’ leaden floods, the rooks,your daughter bringing into songall we hoped when we were young;

the brand new church’s leaking roof –truth in an optimistic life,the break no hand or word can fix,whose healing is the time it takes.Visiting his grave at last,your son whose funeral I missedthat week I barely recollect,I realised the pain I’d blockedno longer mattered next to yours,your lives a hymn to what endures,

a promise that we will prevailin spite of all that bodes us ill –what Hardy deemed capricious fateor those absurd and petty stateswe trail our heart and conscience through:such parodies of all we know,where there’s no wholeness, no redemption;just music’s sudden consolation,the cool joy of a late-March thrush,the drumroll of a deluge-lash:

strange to find such sustenancein crumbs of varied happenstance,light given up for lost renewedby a blade-slit in a sullen cloud.The sleet subsides. The coffee’s cold.A woman and a well-wrapped childsit next to me: the easy gesture,mild intimacy of boy and motherteasing over Christmas lists,are all I need to know exists.

ATLAS

… when as a boy I sat in the shade of the white wall, fearing to die in a state of melancholy more than a state of sin; longing for the emptiness of the holy of holies, its deep and perfect stillness. That restlessness has never left me, it visits me when I see the sun on spires, or glimpse an ancient skyline I know I’ll never visit: or when I see a word like terebinth and whisper it in my head, savouring the scent of sandalwood, or the sap of Solomon’s cedars.

A tree overhangs that wall. Its roots are deep in a fable I once half-heard and understood enough for it to be a grain of grit in the psyche, gathering round itself layers of almost-truths, songs, heroic dreams, things which should have been said, too-late thoughts running through each other like light played on a flawed pearl.

Every quayside is a world’s end. The reality of water, like truth, like love, forces a standstill. Down where the ships tie up, a harbour in another’s mind, who dreamed of palms and the smell of engine oil, I took myself one winter afternoon; I traced in clotted half-light shipping lines curving oh so gently on Mediterranean blue, journey’s length measured in hours, in futures.

My life, it seems, has been an atlas of the never-visited.

DARK WATER

I go back to the black lakein which I stood before I woke.Distracted by a bobbing floatI’d turned to find the jaws of nighthad taken me. Afraid to move,I waited for a hold or waveto finish me. Such utter dark!My very eyes were sealed with ink.They opened on a greyling sky,birds moved across a glass. But Istayed rigid, heart and limbs rebellingagainst the truth my brain was telling.I’d seen that terror in anothertrying to swim from morphine’s smotherbut falling back, to swim, to drown.I’ve feared that ending for my ownand though it only preys at nightit feeds on daylight’s hidden fright.

THRALL

A hidden figure waits to douse the lights.The stage is yours, its emptiness, its smell,that silence swirling like a smoke.No one can doubt you gave your allbut you: this space, like night,still wants, it has a need to swallow.It was more years agothan you care to reckon,and even then success, but it tookyou first time, and there has been,ever since, this ritual admissionof defeat - a dying of applause, a filing out.

Home. Among trinkets and mementoes,wallpaper new where a photo was removed,the hour to kill, the killing hour. It goes.All your life you wanted a pleasant void,it’s what you loved most, that spacenone dared defile, the nearest faceblurred, expectant; and in thrallto its own hope. It was yours to play with.How many times you rode it like a swell!Well it’s gone now. No enterprise, no pithelectrifies the nerves like bitter gin,the blood laced with adrenaline.

There is a floor to pace, a ceilingwill resound to the merest whisperand the sea a walk awaywhile you still want to: best in a swirlingmonotone; a storm brings out that Learyou never quite got. But resignationmay be the worst death. Go back,walk blind like Kent into that rushof terrifying silence, that crashof parting air that suckslife back into exhausted lungs. Playbeyond fear, to the shattered prop, the rifled curtain.

NORTH

Darkness ends. The lake still, no breeze, no ripple.That patient sky unscreened; a distant fuzz of pines.Cold shocks the heart, suddenly the skin prickles,twin cold of air and water tugging along the spine.Heart, I said, there must be an end to desolation,a point beyond our north: the ancient, instant shockof soles on stone ice-dropped, pure, forever glacial.But this is north: the end of every path I took.

Now the cold exhilarates, stabs. The earth is young,I, anxious to be off; towelling quickly, cowedby my somehow having dared to shatter morning.A buzzard keks, climbs sunward, is tiny, blackas the densest coal the instant it becomes a speckof light. The buzzard dives. I see, and day explodes.

PALM

A stranger straightens flowers on a grave,knocked by one of several wayward children.A gentle corner of a warring house,she listened down the years. Did she foreseethese scattered stones, statues left and lifted,the locket no one claims to have? Perhapsa dream of hope held tight till near the end,at last escaping like a tired breath,sustained her through the invective of each call,daughter to daughter, on her sickbed phone.At rest now, earth is but a ticklish skinno clash of wills can scar. A branch of palm,first since her death, has shed uncounted leaveslike Bronze Age ribs, or question marks of gold.

BARLEY

The graveyard grass has long been cut,billiard-table smooth. Over the fieldsbarley wilts like too-green love.Some foreign voice whispers that you wishedat the end for neatness, that the profusionof middle years be settled before stilled.Not to be. Think, if think you can,of these months’ tumult not as riotbut as a river’s course, run where it must,battered on circumstance; your granddaughtertracing a cartoon of Proserpine,her mother stretched on the rack of loathing,flitting in and out of silence’s dusk.

BEADS

A damp stone hidden by the kiss of vegetationwaited to scrape my knee and duly did;I parted ferns to catchthe final digit of a date cut with a flourishtwo centuries ago; the old courtyardsloping toward the lake like a giantstretched out for a long, earned sleep.

A storm breaks where you are, as it does daily:behind your desk, rained on by a riotof rights and questions, I wish the timelesscalm of that carved 2, a swan,and that your mind will unfurl slowlylike a fern, its underside linedas with a string of pearls, a prayer of beads.

TAKING LEAVE

The gaps are churned; summer will work outbefore they green again. In a week or twobanked mud will be caked, bare bladespeep through cracks as from the tops of trenches.

Now the silence of an empty church,the last marquee packed up, cows still keptsafe from scraps of undetected plastic.There is a sense of rolling out, a tiredness

born of fulfilment, a letting go of daysto come, the body-clock unwound.A young girl ticks a clipboard at her ease,then turns and disappears. An engine purrs.

After a lonely winter of endeavour,every thought and step a slithering,work has become its own reward - what painto drag us here! But the exhilaration

of having trumped the odds still warms the blood,still spurs us through the warrens of the mindand lifts us through the nights of being tiredof feet and nails. Yes there were many: such sheer

exhaustion that the spirit tired of hope,and potted plants died of a thirst more bitterthan cold that stoned songbirds in mid-flight.Greater than fear of frost, fear of a thaw.

Yet we have arrived, have set firm feetin days of dog rose and fields’ first cutting,days of ease despite ourselves. The sun has toppedthe mast of a mid-meadow oak. Only for the prick

of stubble we could lie down and dreamwith the easy conscience of those who have come throughbecause that’s all there is; could lie and stretchas if the earth were rooting us again,

the earth in which no toil goes unrewarded.There will be a putting out, from soil, from spirit.Already it is time to be elsewhereand I quicken my step, restless and at rest.

BOATS

In Annascaul the fuchsia will be blazing,hanging over, nectar-heavy. Here,sea darkens steadily and the headlandlights up to a rhythm it keeps to itself.The last broken promise has been cancelled,the green beacon on the furthest spit,hidden by day, is coming into its own.A woman lights a candle on her balconyand foot by foot the boats are lost to night,those three like Van Gogh’s at Saints Mariethat hangs, a sunbleached deadweight, on your walla hundred miles from here, as far from dawn.Hours of glass, of scouring cutlery,Van Gogh, yellow moon, an uncut lawn.

Last month I banked and turned above Fermoy,bridgestone caught in sun, a mason’s cutthat took me back to Hardy; thence to thatcry of Ajax: ‘Light, if only to die by!’

I should have made Kanturk. But let that lie;there is a fact and place of birth, a scratchof ink on paper, blade on stone. The eyewas made for more than seeing; to snatch

at wonder as a skimming hawk at movement,to clutch, fasten, feed. And then to leavefor the mundane, but with a stubborn itchfor knowledge and beyond. To dream. To teach.

II

Water ran lightly. My fingersin a stream were the bars of a gate.The froth detached, disappeared; how swiftly.The earth-sheering power of inertia.

Fingers numb round the leatherof a music case, my mind full of the notionof books. I’d never thought of themunique, beautiful and flawed as gems

or people I’d yet to meet. As pathsnot crossed. I’d believed a sunsetforever lost, unseen by others.

That first poem was like a rockloosed, dislodged, a ceaseless pouring,the stream shaped by the cleft it mastered.

III

The first sparrow hawk I sawhugged the dip of your front lawn,vanished like dark into dark.I forget the book I left that noon,see only white frames, square panes,and that late-year light, its struggle never-ending.

An early visit, my mind took homethe surprise of hall-tiles; a weightof words – drapes, Ecclesiastes,and an older memory of wax.Time and returning gifted more lightly:cell, trifles, air.

You seemed walled in by booksbut drew from them a lightthat fed the chiaroscuroof our collective inner days.Your age like winter, a stepping back,a gathering like trees’ apparent sleeping.

MESSAGE

A handclap, and a thousand crowsshatter the sky. The far lakesideis lost: only a pinpoint glows,an amber and indifferent deed,

a world too burnt out to be naughty.Music starts then peters out,even the band warms up on empty.A darkened shore. No cars. No boat.

Why then do we walk these pathsa continent away, the same –our only jot in common both,our insides as if wreathed in flames,

mine an ancient stab I firstfelt at the age of seven or eight,yours the clenching of a curseyou carry like an endless wait

for something dreaded, never met,fear feeding on itself, a mazeof what might be: of please, not yet.We others who have known such days

but sparingly, can better serveby silence. This we understand;that no one gets what they deserveis merest truth: the trite, the bland

is double-bladed for us twoand others welcoming the nightfor different reasons. Now the fewbirds left are settling, other lights

are pricking out the dark at random,a spotlight bathes a distant rampart.The fire burns as fierce, but seldom,your message all I need of comfort.

SAILBOAT

A sailboat rounds the point,its keel gleaming with lightfrom a childhood island,

the white of waves’ soft kisson sand. Out of uncounted picture books,it turns and straightens

Running with what breeze there isyet stilled to the distant eye, drawingday and two thousand summers to its mast.

I watch from a grassy height,a taste of grapefruit tart against my palate.The sun should be elsewhere,

the sea, too blue: a soldier worn outin an ancient war, intruding on a sceneolder than reed or chanter, all I can do

is mark the imprint of a lonebody on the grass, and wonder why stillnessremains an alien sensation;

I wish I could hang my thoughtlike an old skin at Neptune’s doorand let my gaze wander

like the flight of a gull,mazy, purposeful, with the easeof a mind given to uplift,

beyond weight, beyond fear.

OVER THE HILL “..for there there’d be either radiance or nothing” Easter; Derek Walcott

Black marble and clay, a sudden white like a bandage,lilies unstained, smelling vaguely of earth;earth, our portion of it, in retreat from the sun,leaning back, a child afraid of the water.An old man in search of firewood hokes out a branchhuge and grotesque as a python. He struggles to balance,drops it and shuffles to cold for want of an axe.

A closing in, more than night, more than the hour;over the hill, the lake where a swan has lainunmoving for days in the nest of the end of her life;a girl in the nest of her hunger, breast, bone all but one,a morsel of nothing coaxed in the crook of her armin a house that looks down on the bones of contentment and fever,her limbs like the cogs of a clock when the hands become stuck.

Her own hands, clean beyond cleanness from flour and saltare those of a Trojan captive skivvying in a foreign kitchen,cut off from all but truth, that beast that won’t let go;when, like sun at a fortunate hour, her features settle,something beyond mother, beyond blood, is there: a god mimespeace, breaking a thousand years of body and words,the clotted tale of our fumbling, our daubing a ghost.

And there is such peace in her features: a statue breakingthe plane of light at the window which gives on the sea;her mind is at one with that boat, its cargo and crewcleaving a sea calm as Tauris when Iphigenia cameinto her own. The breeze through a crack in the doorhas the death of the fierce warmth of sand. A chime in the hallstartles but punctures no silence. And so it begins:

a folding of life like a wing too tired to stir,a settling of beauty like flowers in the dryness of noon.And I, with a tooth not quite broken, waiting alonebut for a roomful of books and a mind full of others,plain, empty and tired, light a wick for a faceI may never see: enough that it flickered and lefta space alive with its absence, a shadow of light.

RAIN

There is a moment of imprisonmentby rain, by memory, by fear –when we touch something given to usbefore we knew what a gift was.It never goes away: it will drown usif we stay too long or venture too deepand we will never know where it came fromnor where it waits. But wait it does,for a rain so harsh it wipes allbut bleakness and beauty, indistinguishable.

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